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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 5,615
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
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I was also doubtful that stuff could be successfully hidden / kept secret from the population for so long. Surely at very least there's have been conspiracy theories (which apparently thrived in at least one sub-community)
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(Quote) Yup, they're all way better than the one I found :)
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(Quote) I'd always said Hy-pay-sha in my head (so to speak) so I guess I must have read the same dictionary source as @NeilNjae
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Interested to see what people write here!
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Hmmm. Wasn't really convinced by this. The sheer difficulty of the planet meant that surely they had to be close by. Yet no effort to really look for them. I'm not sure I buy the "details of them were suppressed" argument, mainly because t…
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I confess to not being very up on noir so can't comment. Interested to hear what others say.
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The two main characters remain vivid for me but actually a week or so after finishing the book, I'm struggling to remember many of the other individuals. So I guess for me the overall setting and society was more memorable than the people inside it.…
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Both cultures made sense, each in their own way. I kept wanting to know more of the back story but actually felt that just enough of it was revealed - had there been much more it would have become too much about that and not enough about the present…
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I understood the conversion of the first ship (two habitat rings) into the colony. But then the revelation that the Exiles had what seems to be a third ring kind of threw me. How can they not of known everything about each other? The journey from on…
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I felt it was reasonably clear that they had formed a couple by the end of the book, but I agree that one could read it as simply a close colleague relationship. Once or twice I tried to work out what the difference in age would have been if one cou…
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They were so bleak I wondered how they'd managed to survive this long! I mean, I know that as has been said, in the long run we're all dead, but the planet was so inhospitable in so many ways that you wonder why they bothered. I guess there was an e…
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If anything a bit too slow. I kind of wanted things to speed up more, but I appreciate that Elizabeth Bonesteel had a different agenda in mind :) Also on narration, I did like the way Maddie's "version" was presented mostly (entirely?)…
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Fundamentally I liked this book, but never quite as much as I kept thinking I should! I felt that the concept was the strongest part of it, and very much appreciated the different layers being revealed at different times. That worked for me. I think…
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Discussion area for The House on the Borderland sorted
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Hi all especially @clash_bowley - how are we all getting on with Arkhangelsk?
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(Quote) Another one I've not heard of but it nicely continues my current trend of tackling late C19th and early C20th books :)
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Discussion area for City set up now.
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> @Apocryphal said: > BTW I saw this for the first time on Friday in a used bookshop. Ha! Nothing like a good coincidence 😁
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I also equally belatedly realised the parallels between Ayesha (_She_) and the various witches in the Narnia, especially the Lady of the Green Kirtle in _The Silver Chair_ who has the same combination of beauty, compelling voice, and serpentine qual…
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If all are OK then I'll set up the discussion area over the next few days
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One of the curious features (to me, at least) of the book was that the job of spy was regarded by Carruthers and Davies as being rather underhand and somehow not "nice"... while still going about the process of actually being spies. As tho…
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(Quote) I've not heard of it before (in fact I've read almost no Simak) but it looks intriguing!
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I used to love it too, and was hugely disappointed with the 1998 film attempt. It's an interesting connection to this book which I hadn't thought of.
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Hi all, discussion of Riddle of the Sands seems to be dwindling now but if anyone's got anything more to add please jump in :) Also, a reminder that August's read is Arkhangelsk chosen by @clash_bowley
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(Quote) Yes, employment was kind of lackadaisical back then regarding leave applications... though to be fair to his employer it didn't sound as though he was terrifically busy when he was there so maybe he wouldn't be missed too much...
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(Quote) How excellent! Shows off the watersheds behind each of the islands really well
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(Quote) It's a place where the written version comes over much better than the film - in that version you just see them going through mist and stuff and don't really get much sense of how difficult it would have been. There's a bit of voice-over say…
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(Quote) Yes that's the kind of thing I was wondering about - whether it could work in an RPG or (as @BarnerCobblewood suggests) might be better in a tabletop mode. But the basic idea of having terrain that isn't uniformly fixed, and hence the need …
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(Quote) Milkin here is transparently a thinly-veiled Melek or Moloch hence the dichotomy between bestowing kingly gifts or cursing them :) That aside, my long-ago memory of random encounters while travelling was that they served mainly to boost lev…
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Some of the tales in the compendium "invasion genre" book I've been reading - all the stories having been written between 1871 and 1914 - have a kind of post-apocalyptic feel to them. It's like the writers were trying to posit "this i…